First big compliments on corsix-th! Impressive effort! I stumbled upon this project because I wanted to take some screen recordings of Theme Hospital animations to clarify a generic question I asked on gamedev.stackexchange.com:

Once I edited the question with images from Corsix-TH I realized that the fine people working on corsix-th could probably tell me exactly how the animations work in Theme Hospital so I wanted to ask it here too.

I would appreciate it if anyone could spare the time to clarify how the sprites are set up. Just trying to understand the theory of how such a game works a bit better.

In TH there are actually one set of sprites for each animation. For example the patient chair in the GPs office has a lot of different animations for each patient type, where the chair is in each one of them... I wouldn't suggest that method though.

If you download CorsixTH there is a program called AnimView bundled with it (at least in the windows version) where you can check all the animations. The desk animation for the doctor is aound number 58 while the nurse is at around 3250.